Professional Hard Drive and Flash Data Recovery Services

USB flash Data Recovery Information

These are some real problems experienced by USB flash hard drives we see in our lab. We are not affiliated in any way with hard drive manufacturers. All the information below is based solely on our experience and we do not make any claims regarding reliability of the specific model. We see mostly failed drives in our lab and therefore we don't have complete statistics.

Flash memory devices are very vulnerable to all sorts of environmental influence. For example, without a cap your drive could be vulnerable to static discharge. Water, humidity, dust, extreme temperatures could also be fatal. Usual symptoms of failing drives are: USB flash disk drive does not work as expected, it is no longer seen connected under Windows XP/Vista, Mac or BIOS, it doesn't show up in Device manager and Found new hardware wizard doesn't pop up or it can't find standard USB mass storage device driver. Also after inserting faulty USB stick you could get "Usb device not recognized" message in Windows.

Also Windows could give an error saying that USB Device has malfunctioned and therefore cannot recognize the device. Sometimes the device itself might be seen but no partitions or volumes could be found. Or partition might be present but user gets an error when trying to access this volume. File system might also be recognized as "unknown", "raw" and be 0 bytes in size. You might get "The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility" warning in Event viewer..

In case the drive was reformatted or some files were deleted we could also help. Our engineers use special hardware that is capable of reading raw NAND flash chips and reconstructing the original file system on the drive.

Data recovery for such drives usually requires unsoldering internal NAND chip, cloning it using special flash reader device and using specialized software and algorithms to decipher image contents. It's quite a time-consuming process and requires a lot of patience and knowledge..

If you hear your USB flash hard drive making some other unusual noises visit our Hard Drive Sounds page for more typical sounds these drives make.

If you experience any of the problems above with your USB flash hard drive and need data recovered from it please fill out Fast Quote Form to get free upfront quote on data recovery from your failed HDD.

Please keep in mind that above information is based solely on experience of Datacent staff. We see mostly failed drives in our Lab and therefore we don't have complete statistics. All brands have their specific problems and there is nothing more reilable than regular backup.

Warning!
We have seen a number of websites lately cloning information from our pages.
Stay away from those companies. You can steal information but you can't steal knowledge and experience!